World Bulletin / News Desk

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been secretly providing data to nearly two dozen government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to leaked classified documents obtained by The Intercept.

Domestic law enforcement agencies have for years been able to access massive amounts of surveillance data obtained by the NSA via the ICREACH search engine, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency as key participants.

The search engine contains information on the private communications between foreigners as well as millions of records on U.S. nationals, according to the documents provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Accessible to more than 1,000 analysts at 23 U.S. government intelligence agencies, ICREACH allowed agents to track people’s movements, map out their networks of associates, predict future actions and reveal religious affiliations or political beliefs.

ICREACH was capable of taking two to five billion new records every day and storing more than 30 different kinds of metadata on emails, phone calls, faxes, internet chats, text messages and location information collected from cellphones.